In computing, a keyboard is a hardware component that acts as mechanical levers or electronic switches to allow a user to input characters or symbols into a computer with a board of keys. Despite the discovery of alternative input devices, such as the mice, touch-sensitive screens, light pens, trackballs, joysticks, and voice recognition devices, the keyboard remains the most widely used and most versatile peripheral used for direct input into computers. A keyboard generally has characters printed or engraved on the keys. In most cases, every single press of a key corresponds to a single written symbol. However, in some cases, to input some symbols require depressing and holding multiple keys concurrently or in sequence. While majority of keyboard keys produce letters, numbers or signs, other keys or simultaneous key presses can produce certain computer commands or other actions.
A keyboard layout relates to the way of multiple keys of a keyboard are arranged in terms of mechanical, functional, and visual layout. Mechanical layout pertains to the physical arrangements and shapes of keys on the keyboard. Functional layout, however, pertains to the arrangement of key-meaning associations of all the keys of a keyboard, relying on the software used to determine this. Lastly, a visual layout pertains to the arrangement of legends or markings on the keys of a keyboard. There are numerous types of arrangements of alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation symbols on the keys. These different types of arrangements of keyboard layouts are getting high demand largely because different user groups require easy access to different symbols for inputting text in different languages, or a specialized layout for those in the fields of computer programming, mathematics, and accounting or other purposes.
The most common layout and physical arrangements of keys on keyboards that are not limited to a specific geographical area is the “QWERTY” layout. Most operating systems have keyboard layout software that allows a user to change the keyboard locale, such as, from a common QWERT keyboard layout to an Arabic keyboard layout. Normally, there is a sign on the computer screen informing the user that what keyboard locale is currently chosen. However, none of the visual markings of the keys themselves changes when a different locale is chosen. Thus, a user will not know what Arabic characters will be appeared on the computer screen when a particular English key is depressed, unless the user has memorized the locations of all the Arabic characters on the keyboard.
Thus, there is a problem concerning the visual markings of characters belonging to different languages on a single keyboard, because a single keyboard can have characters of one or two languages at the most, which limits the number of languages that can be available on the keyboard. As a result, manufacturers will not able to satisfy the needs of all users around the world in terms of their needed language. This problem requires the manufacturer to use different production lines to print the characters of every distinct language on the manufactured keyboards in order to meet the demands of the worldwide markets.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a keyboard system with changeable key displays which are capable to change displays of different set of indicia for different languages input or other purposes.